Thursday, June 11, 2015

Do you have a lucky or unlucky dice? Well you can now Check it for sure.

Daniel Fisher has figured out how to use a old trick to see if a golf ball is balanced to see how lucky or unlucky his dice are.

+Tim Shorts had a d20 called Whimpy that always came through for him. I wonder how it would fare in this test.

This came in handy for him one time when he had a fighter named Slice Handler. We were playing ADnD 1st edition with Unearthed Arcana. Slice's main trick was to use the weapon specialization rules to throw a hail storm of daggers. I played a vanilla magic-user named Thil the Cowled.

As things shook out in the campaign, we wound up in my friend's +Dwayne Gillingham's modified X5 Temple of Death. For a long time this module was the end goal of his campaigns, and nobody had beaten it until Slice and Thil got there.

We got to the final room where on a altar was the Hand and Eye of Vecna. Thil went dark side, maimed himself, and affixed the eye and hand to himself. He ordered Slice to submit and when he didn't a PC vs PC fight ensued. Thil had the upper hand but Slice was dealing damage as well. So it came down to a round where Slice had a handful of hit points and was seemly out of options. See Whimpy had an Achilles Heel in that it was great for to-hit rolls it was terrible for making saving throws.

Tim resigned himself to another failure at conquering the Temple of Death when he looked at some notes on his characters. He grew excited and confirmed the details with Dwayne. Apparently he had a magical earring in the shape of a dagger. It would grow into a full size dagger if he threw it.

Armed with this final chance and of course Tim's legendary dice Whimpy, he threw the dagger. He got what he needed to hit and downed Thil. Tim sighed in relief as finally one of his character conquered the Temple of Death.

This is incredibly interesting. I have a ton of opaque dice sets that I roll terribly with. I'm sure they will prove to be very unbalanced. Though, I do also have a set of precision dice that I have managed to consistently roll terribly with. But, unbalanced dice are tangible so I'll just blame my bad rolls on that.

I Suspect that Roll20's random dice generator is weighted. Either that, or my ability to get lucky rolls when needed doesn't translate to the internet. Over the years, I've had a lot of dice. I'm thinking ignorance is bliss on this one.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.